What are you saying?
A complete breakdown of the world of warcraft episode of south park (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft_co mes_to_South_Park) or the complete, 8 pages if you print it out, biography of Bender from futurama (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bender_Bending_Rodr% C3%ADguez) are useless?

And yet, we couldn't convince the community that they needed to keep a short, 1 page blurb on the official counterstrike maps - de_dust, cs_office etc. Despite that 1 in 15 people in america owns counterstrike, and at any point, even years after its release, there are 100,000 people playing it, or that it's by far the most popular first person shooter ever.

You've been able to take wikipedia with you for years. Lots of people do it with Tomeraider, but I get the impression there's a number of options. I first did it 2003ish and I got the impression it had been around a while then.

"LAP-TOP: smaller and lighter than the average secretaryPORTABLE: smaller and lighter than the average refrigeratorTRANSPORTABLE: neither chained to a wall nor attached to an alarm system"
-- THE PERSONAL COMPUTER AWARENESS DICTIONARY

I would imagine it would be compressed, and since much of the wiki is text it would shrink a lot.I'm thinking at 2 GB would do it, which would easily fit on today's flash memory. And for multimedia content such a pics, they cold convert to smaller and lower quality jpeg's saving at least that much.

Sorry, but I actually know something about this... My job this summer revolved around this issue, and seeing how much of Wikipedia we could cram into about 10 MB. (Hint: OLPC [laptop.org] is using a subset of Wikipedia as its primary out-of-the-box reference material.)

The images on Wikipedia as of this January are about 76 GB in size. Now, assume we can switch to low-quality JPEGs and cut the size down to 5% of its current - about the size you'd get from switching all the images to black-and-white, in fact. Making that jump is a big assumption, but even that only gets you down to about 4 GB.

I presume it will be available once the selection/cleanup process is finished - after all, all software on the laptop is open-source.

The other offline versions of Wikipedia have a lot going for them, too - if you're interested, take a look at Wikipedia 1.0 [wikipedia.org], and lend a hand if you care to. They're a very worthwhile effort, fully backed by Wikimedia and Jimmy Wales, and they're more specifically targeting CD- and DVD-sized versions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:DUMP [wikipedia.org] has all the info on downloading wikipedia. A.bz2 of the.xml for articles (no talk pages) is 1,5 GB; while all pages, talk and history is a snip at 45,9 GB.

Community server - I'm not sure what you mean, but since we can't always count on the laptops' having network connectivity, we're packaging a small (10-50 MB), static subset of Wikipedia directly on the laptops' storage, updateable on connection to the network (meaning Internet and/or local school server).

No pipe dream - unless I'm mistaken, the current OLPC ideal is to have a server in every school. However, the server won't act as a Wikipedia repository any more than each laptop will - except in that it may store additional Wikipedia "bundles" (groups of articles packaged as e-books) locally.

We should take this offline, well, online, but off of/. ; I'm interested (being in IT and Dev myself) at how exactly OLPC is intended to get distributed, how training/diffusion of the new tech is expected/planned/hoped to happen? A million laptops is a lot to deal with for a recipient country, especially as they'll be largely new (open hardware and software, yay, but this specific combo hasn't been seen before). my email is (oh god I'm about to post my email on/.!!) my_slashdot_username @ my_slashdot_us

Ehi, if you can squeeze wikipedia in ~2Gb You could fit it in a PSP!A memory stick can hold 4Gb and imagine telling your mum that you are taking it to school 'cause it's a pocket encyclopedia!(not that it'd matter to me, I'm a little older, but still...)

You didn't compress well enough. The Wikipedia-on-TomeRaider project gets the English Wikipedia (January 2006) down to 2GB with "many images" and to 4GB with "all images". See here [infodisiac.com]. Maybe you should look into producing an open source TomeRaider viewer that would work on your Linux OLPC; TomeRaider is by far the best e-book format around, so this would benefit the OLPC project in many ways.

You find me confused. First you say 6GB compression of all articles and pictures is "an achievement"; when pointed that it isn't that good, you claim that you can of course do better than that. So give us the numbers: how small do you get the full Wikipedia with all pictures?

Why is nobody noticing the elephant in the room?
Webaroo is an ASTONISHINGLY bad idea. Clutter up your drives with gigabytes of "stuff" on the off chance that you might do the occasional search offline which, as actual results, uses a vanishingly small percentage of that "stuff". And aren't we all connected wirelessly nowadays anyway?
As for the even worse "feature" of automatic resynchronization: the mind shudders at the storm of pointless bandwidth to update the "stuff".
I can't wait for them to go p

Okay, so I asked around on the Wikimedia IRC channel.
Ashley`: Is that how big it is? I would've thought it would be humongous.
RealGrouchy: someone is saying "I'd expect it to be compressed since it is text, so you coudl probably get it down to 2gb"
RealGrouchy:...I would suspect, though, that it is already fairly compact
TimStarling: it depends on how they are distributing it

But then we would need swap space to unzip it on the fly and extract the page we are looking for!
I shudder to think of how to go about doing that in real time with minimal memory
All your base are belong to us!

While one of the basic strengths of Wikipedia is its updatability, I would question the point of storing all the articles offline. Admittedly, TFA does say it'll sync up the data the next time you go online, but it'll practically eat up all your disk space eventually.
I think I'll stick to just checking it online quickly on my humble Motorola A780.

"While one of the basic strengths of Wikipedia is its updatability, I would question the point of storing all the articles offline."

To be fair, there's a plethora of historical data on Wikipedia that probably won't be touched much over the next year or so. Personally, one of the reasons I want a Treo is so I can hit Wikipedia from time to time. But if I could download a version of it today and update it once a year or so, I'm confident it'd be worthwhile even though it's not up to date.

I would think you could set up a filter of some sort, or require more human intervention while syncing...

But would it really matter if it was constantly updated? If you have a good starting base of information, I think it would suffice. If anything came into question, you'd be able to check it later when you reach an internet connection.

We all don't have online access, so an offline solution is VERY useful. Obviously, it's just a dated snapshot, but it's certainly more useful than having nothing. I have an LG phone by Verizon (provided by work, so I have no choice as to model) and Web browsing is a MAJOR headache--it's simply not worth the hassle. Having an offline Wikipedia resource could be most invaluable. And besides, do we REALLY need to have the absolutely current, most recently updated version? No! It IS possible to live with Wikipe

I don't think the iPod would be able to decompress whatever compression they wind up using, unless software is written for the iPod, which would be undesirable. I don't want to reboot my iPod just to read Wikipedia. Then there's battery life to consider. I don't know how much battery life it would use up to decompress parts of Wikipedia, but that might be an annoyance, too.

... initial excitement died down after a major publishing house announced the release of a competing device. With a cheaper price, and the words "Don't Panic" written in large, friendly letters on the cover, the new version, tentatively called "The Guide Mk 1", is expected to dramatically outsell Wikipedia's own offering.

Wikipedia regularly dumps the entire database, which is available to download [wikimedia.org]. However, It looks like they're having trouble getting them out lately (link is to a September 25 English dump, which hasn't yet successfully completed).

The compressed dump files are huge, and I wouldn't want to even attempt downloading them without wget or unless a torrent were provided directly by Wikipedia (why is this not being done yet?)

In 2009 slinging 100 GB data files across the net or between devices should be trivial, but not yet.

However, I have a truly marvelous demonstration of how to compress Wikipedia, which the margin of this comment is just barely large enough to contain:

Call somebody with Internet access and ask them. P.S. Wow, this also works for compressing Google... Hey, this margin is not as narrow as I thought.

Unless you are going way-out where there is no conectivity of any sort, why not just connect and get only what you need. If you trully need total access to Wikipedia offline you probably want at least a laptop just for comfortable use, most people arn't like me and happy to try and do everything though a Tungsen T5.

Wapedia is just one of the 3 main sites to access wikipedia via wap - so if one service is down you can use others. see Wikipedia via Wap Access [wikipedia.org] These sites have all been available for a while so this thread is old news I'm afraid.

I like the one at wikipedia.7val.com for phones. I run a mobile search portal at http://wampad.com/ [wampad.com]. I had the site set to use google to transcode wikipedia.org but this 7val.com version works well enough that I switched my site over to it.

I have tried using my OpenWave browser and overall it has worked well. However, I did run into a few minor problems, mostly because Wikipedia does not output the format in WML/HDML when browsed by a mobile browser. I submitted this to the Wikipedia's feature request list, but it got turned down. If you do happen to have problems browing Wikipedia on your mobile device, don't expect it to get fixed any time soon. Let's keep our fingers crossed that wikipedia will soon realize the importance of supporting

There's not really that big of a need to have the entire Wikipedia downloaded onto your PDA. I hope that most of Webaroo's users know that, as some of the links indicate, you can already access Wikipedia (or nearly any website for that matter) via mobile web on your cell phone / PDA. I suppose if I were going to be somewhere that did not have internet access, then downloading it would come in quite handy, but I've always thought the thing that distinguished Wikipedia from more traditional resources is th

Not necessarily!
Trivia is not trivialized by having access to authentic data!
Infact, it can stimulate more such discussions!Gyan over beer may become the norm - if you can remember the entire argument the next day, that is!
Interestingly, discussions in a pub lead to the most authentic source of trivia [wikipedia.org]! Who knows, wikipedia may benefit in some way by this as well!

If you can find out when they take their snapshots this sounds like a great way to get your chosen piece of misinformation or spam replicated to thousands of PDAs across the globe, some of whom will probably never bother to update.

I guess if I were still a bartender, this would be a necessity in solving bar disputes before they escalate to fisticuffs

I use my Samsung SCH A950 (Verizon) and Google already. The local bar that I frequent has a daily trivia question. If you're the first to get it right you get a free drink. I'm currently disqualified because I "cheat". I can't recall the last time I haven't found the correct answer in under 10 minutes.

And here's the link [infodisiac.com] to Erik Zachte's Wikipedia-on-TomeRaider project. Works on Palm and Pocket PCs and requires the $38 TomeRaider shareware and a 2GB (if you want many images) or 4GB (if you want all images) memory card.

I've been using Wikipedia on a PocketPC for at least a couple of years, thanks to Erik Zachte's project at http://infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/index.html [infodisiac.com] which turns Wikipedia dump files into TomeRaider (http://www.tomeraider.com/ [tomeraider.com]).tr3 files. TomeRaider's also available for Palm, Windows and other formats. The Wikipedia file takes up 893Mb on my SD card and is probably the major reason I still bother with PocketPC. Looks like the download link's 404'd at the minute though, don't know if that's temporary.

Then I read the content, and realized I/still/ can't access a PDA-friendly online version of wikipedia.
All I really want is to be able to browse it online from my mobile device (64MB) without it being ugly.

That whole post was an explanation. I have a feeling he/she wasn't a troll, but a regular slashdot reader who was fed up with all the modding down. Too few good posts are let out of the trash pile, and too many are modded down to the seventh circle. It was sort of funny that he posted that he was wasting a mod point, because whoever modded him down could not have used it for something better.

I think the discussion system could use improvement, and so did whoever posted that.